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beoShaffer comments on Open Thread, March 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Does anyone know much about general semantics? Given the very strong outside view similarities between it and less wrong. Not to mention the extent to which it directly influenced the sequences it seems like it's history could provide some useful lessons. Unfortunately, I don't really know that much about it.
EDIT: disregard this comment, I mistook general semantics for, well, semantics.
I'm no expert on semantics but I did take a couple of undergrad courses on philosophy of language and so forth. My impression was that EY has already taken all the good bits, unless you particularly feel like reading arguments about whether a proposition involving "the current king of France" can have a truth value or not. (actually, EY already covered that one when he did rubes and bleggs).
In a nutshell, the early philosophers of language were extremely concerned about where language gets its meaning from. So they spent a lot of time talking about what we're doing when we refer to people or things, eg. "the current king of France" and "Sherlock Holmes" both lack real-world referents. And then there's the case where I think your name is John and refer to you as such, but your name is really Peter, so have I really succeeded in referring to you? And at some point Tarski came up with "snow is white" is a true proposition if and only if snow is white. And that led into the beginning of modern day formal/compositional semantics, where you have a set of things that are snow, and a set of things that are white, and snow is white if and only if the set of things that are snow overlaps completely with the set of things that are white.
I see. Do you know much about the history of it as a movement? While I do have some interest in the actual content of the area I was mostly looking at it as a potentail member of the same refernce class as LW. Specially, I was wondering if its history might contain lessons that are generally useful to any organization that is trying to improve peoples' thinking abilities. Particularly those that have formed a general philosophy based off of insights gained from cross-disiplinary study.
My apologies, I went off in completely the wrong direction there. I don't know too much of it as a movement, other than that all the accounts of it I've seen make it sound distinctly cultish, and that the movement was carried almost entirely by Korzybski and later by one of his students.
I was and am very influenced by Stuart Chase's The Tyranny of Words-- what I took away from it is to be aware that you never have the complete story, and that statements frequently need to be pinned down as to time, place, and degree of generality.
Cognitive psychology has a lot of overlap with general semantics-- I don't know whether there was actual influence or independent invention of ideas.